Ask HN: How do I easily catalog a couple thousand physical books?
by deanebarker on Hacker News.
I own a couple thousand books. I’d like to catalog them all. I have a child who is a broke college student, so I was thinking of paying them to do it over break. What’s the most efficient way to do this from an INTAKE standpoint? I need to get all the ISBNs into a database of some kind. (The only other info I need is whether or not it’s a hardcover or software — that’s something only the physical copy can tell me, everything else I should be able to get from the ISBN.) I don’t want my daughter to have to find and key all the ISBNs in. Can they be scanned in some way? Is the ISBN in the UPC code? Could I buy a cheap bar code scanner and just have her scan away?